Energy Policies
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, after failing to pass any radical climate proposals this year, it appears our colleagues across the aisle are in a panic mode. The reason is, later this week, President Biden will be traveling to Glasgow, along with a dozen or more U.S. officials and Members of Congress, for a U.N. climate summit, and it looks like they are going to show up empty-handed.
The President has talked a big game when it comes to climate change. On the campaign trail, he promised that the electric sector would be carbon pollution-free by 2035. He committed to building 1.5 million energy-efficient homes and public housing units, and he said the United States would transition from oil and gas.
Of course, he will be long gone from office, so he will never be held accountable for these projections, even if they miss by a mile, which I predict they will. But the fact is he has failed to make good on his promises to fundamentally transform the energy landscape in America, and I would suggest that that is for a very good reason.
Policies that drive up costs for the American people, hurt our energy security, and enrich our adversaries don't typically get a lot of traction here in the U.S. Congress.
Two-and-a-half years ago, we saw a great example of how unpopular these policies were when the pie-in-the-sky Green New Deal came to the Senate floor for a vote. Not a single Senator voted for that bill. Even the Members who introduced it were too afraid to vote yes because of the blowback.
But now that our Democratic colleagues control all levers of the Federal Government, afraid of their radical base, their calculus seems to have changed, so they are trying to jam these radical policies into the multitrillion-dollar tax-and-spending spree bill, otherwise known as reconciliation.
Despite working on this bill for months and only needing Democrat support to get it to the President's desk, our Democratic colleagues are still struggling to reach an agreement among themselves. But now that President Biden has a deadline and he wants to look good in front of other world leaders in Glasgow, it is, apparently, crunch time.
But they have a problem: no bill has even been written or even seen the light of day. There is a steady stream of reporting about which outrageous policies are in and which are out, but none of us have seen a bill--we haven't seen it in writing--if it exists at all.
Based on reporting, though, massive tax hikes on the energy sector appear to be in the mix. Energy companies would pay higher taxes on income earned in the global marketplace and be subjected to the double taxation of their foreign incomes. And we know that when producers have higher overhead because of the higher tax burden, they don't absorb that; they pass it along to consumers in terms of higher prices.
Our Democratic colleagues want to also add a Superfund excise tax, which would force energy companies to pay more on every barrel of crude oil that is sold. Tax hikes on oil and gas companies won't increase the output of renewables, and renewables only accounted for 20 percent of the electricity generation last year while natural gas accounted for double that.
That is why, in my State, we believe in the all-of-the-above approach--all forms of energy--knowing that the Sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. We found out last year, because of extremely cold weather, we couldn't even put natural gas in the pipeline because we didn't have the electricity to run the compressors, and so it was--no pun intended--a perfect storm.
What we learned from that experience--and I think what we should all learn--is that renewables have their place. They are important, and their role is growing, but you have to have a reliable base load of energy, which renewables cannot supply. The only outcome of these tax hikes will be to drive up costs for working families and send more business to foreign energy producers.
I remember recently that President Biden, in looking at the high price of gasoline--which has gone up dramatically--looked to OPEC--the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries--led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, and asked them to produce more oil.
Well, how about American energy producers and the jobs that go along with that and the pipelines that move that oil and gas safely around the country?
He is OK with Nord Stream 2, which is a Russian gas pipeline over in Europe; but when it comes to the Keystone XL Pipeline here in America, ``shut her down'' is his attitude.
Massive tax increases aren't the only provisions that seem to have survived negotiations, the best we can tell from the reporting. Handouts to wealthy Americans to buy electric vehicles appears to be safe. Talk about socialism for rich people. These aren't cars that average working families can afford to buy. They are, roughly, double or more expensive than regular cars operating on an internal combustion engine. Nevertheless, this bill, apparently, will provide for $12,500 in tax credits for electric vehicle purchases--again, for some of the most expensive cars in the marketplace.
So, for those people working for a living, who cannot afford to buy these expensive electric vehicles even with this very generous tax credit, they are going to be asked to subsidize the purchase of these vehicles by wealthy Americans who don't need the tax credit or the subsidy coming from hard-working American families.
This subsidy isn't only set up to reward buyers purchasing American- made vehicles; you can still receive a taxpayer handout even if the vehicle is completely or substantially made overseas, in countries like China.
On top of that, a bigger tax credit is available to electric cars built in union shops. Well, maybe union-built vehicles are somehow more green than other electric vehicles. I doubt that. Or maybe it is a favor doled out to a favored interest group by our friends across the aisle. That seems like the more likely conclusion.
While electric vehicles don't use gasoline, they still require a lot of energy to run. Our colleagues don't, apparently, know where electricity needed to run these vehicles comes from. Well, I will tell them. It comes from coal; it comes from natural gas; it comes from renewables; it comes from hydropower and nuclear power or some mixture of all of those. Yet these are the very energy sources they say they are seeking to avoid by incentivizing more use of electric vehicles.
Well, if Democrats raise taxes on companies that produce natural gas, which accounts for 40 percent of our electricity production, what is the plan to power the fleet of taxpayer-subsidized electric vehicles?
Renewables don't generate enough energy to power our country today, let alone the amount we need to charge millions of new electric vehicles. Still, the Democrats are eager to push America toward renewables and punish those who don't jump on board.
One of the most controversial parts of the Democrats' energy push appears to be in peril, if you can believe the reporting. Again, none of us have seen this. We just know what we read. That program is known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program, or the CEPP. This program would reward utility companies that already use renewable electricity sources and punish those that do not.
So, if you are wondering how that switch would go, just look at some of the energy policies out West, in California. That State made an aggressive push to transition to push 100-percent renewables by 2030, but as I said, renewable energy is not always reliable energy, and it certainly isn't affordable energy. In recent years, California has implemented rolling blackouts to ration limited energy supplies during the hot summer months; and, on average, Californians pay twice as much as Texans for electricity. That is where those higher prices go--they get passed on to the consumer. Twice as much is the cost of electricity in California as compared to Texas.
So imagine what would happen if every utility company across the country were forced to use only renewable sources.
Last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Commissioner testified before the Senate, and he said this proposal would be an ``H bomb'' for electricity markets. It would blow it up.
Our colleague, Senator Manchin, from West Virginia, has said he won't support this proposal; and good for him, but other Democrats have not given up yet.
President Biden recently insisted ``nothing has been formally agreed to.''
Again, this whole process is opaque to Republicans because we haven't been invited to the table or welcomed to the table to try to come up with a bipartisan policy. Our Democratic colleagues have insisted they want to do this all on their own because they know only then will they be able to come up, presumably, with something that will appease the most radical elements of their political base, and if they negotiated with the Republicans, they wouldn't be able to do that because we would have to negotiate toward the center rather than on the fringes of political ideology.
Despite the fact that these policies that I have mentioned would radically transform the energy landscape and drive up costs to consumers and hurt our energy security, our colleagues are rushing-- rushing--to reach a deal before the President is wheels up to Europe. Forget sound public policy; President Biden wants a new talking point at the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
This rush job comes at a time when energy prices are already skyrocketing. Talk about inflation. Gasoline is up more than 55 percent from a year ago. With winter fast approaching, heating bills, including heating oil that many Northern States use, are expected to rise as much as 54 percent from last year. This is really an invisible tax on people, where the value of your dollar that you earn is diminished by the increase in cost--54 percent over last year for heating bills in the northern part of our country. Well, it is all across the country, but it is, obviously, needed more there than in my part of the country.
Of course, these aren't the only higher prices that families are facing. Inflation continues to pummel the American people, putting a tight squeeze on family budgets. For seniors, for veterans, and others who operate on fixed incomes, those price hikes are a threat to their livelihoods. There could not be a more dangerous or costly time to wage war on American energy. No family should have to choose between buying groceries and turning on the heat in the wintertime.
President Biden is eager to put a show on in Glasgow and impress world leaders with dubious commitments that he can't keep, but these measures have the potential to inflict real and lasting harm on the American people.
I am not opposed to renewable energy, electric vehicles, or efforts to preserve our greatest natural resources for future generations. I support efforts to capture carbon and sequester it. All of these policies need to strike a delicate balance based on prudence, based on science, and based on logic, not based on some ideology about the way that you wish the world was; it is how the world is.
Democrats want to force the American people to pay more for less reliable energy and endanger our own energy security to meet these arbitrary net zero deadlines. As I said, they are rushing to meet a deadline so that President Biden can have a good applause line in Glasgow.
This is just the latest example of how the reckless tax-and-spending spree is not helping the American people at all but, rather, it is about forcing Democrats' vision on every city, State, and family in the country.
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